DÖBEREINER’S TRIADS (CLASSIFICATION OF ELEMENTS)

At present, 114 elements are known to us. Around the year 1800, only 30 elements were known. All these had seemingly different properties.

As different elements were being discovered, scientists gathered more and more information about the properties of these elements. They found it difficult to organise all that was known about the elements. They started looking for some pattern in their properties, on the basis of which they could study such a large number of elements with ease.

Making Order out of Chaos – Early Attempts at the Classification of Elements

We have been learning how various things or living beings can be classified on the basis of their properties. Even in other situations, we come across instances of organisation based on some properties. For example, in a shop, soaps are kept together at one place while biscuits are kept together elsewhere. Even among soaps, bathing soaps are stacked separately from washing soaps. Similarly, scientists made several attempts to classify elements according to their properties and obtain an orderly arrangement out of chaos.

The earliest attempt to classify the elements resulted in grouping the then known elements as metals and non-metals. Later further classifications were tried out as our knowledge of elements and their properties increased.

Figure 5.1 Imagine you and your friends have found pieces of an old map to reach a treasure. Would it be easy or chaotic to find the way to the treasure? Similar chaos was there in Chemistry as elements were known but there was no clue as to how to classify and study about them.

Döbereiner’s Triads

In the year 1817, Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner, a German chemist, tried to arrange the elements with similar properties into groups. He identified some groups having three elements each. So he called these groups ‘triads’. Döbereiner showed that when the three elements in a triad were written in the order of increasing atomic masses; the atomic mass of the middle element was roughly the average of the atomic masses of the other two elements.

In Table 5.1, There are some groups of three elements. These elements are arranged downwards in order of increasing atomic masses.

We will find that groups B and C form Döbereiner triads. Döbereiner could identify only three triads from the elements known at that time (Table 5.2). Hence, this system of classification into triads was not found to be useful.